Covering the whole development process for the global biotechnology industry

Bioprocessing begins upstream, most often with culturing of animal or microbial cells in a range of vessel types (such as bags or stirred tanks) using different controlled feeding, aerating, and process strategies.

Beginning with harvest of material from a bioreactor, downstream processing removes or reduces contaminants to acceptable levels through several steps that typically include centrifugation, filtration, and/or chromatographic technologies.

Drug products combine active pharmaceutical ingredients with excipients in a final formulation for delivery to patients in liquid or lyophilized (freeze-dried) packaged forms — with the latter requiring reconstitution in the clinical setting.

Many technologies are used to characterize biological products, manufacturing processes, and raw materials. The number of options and applications is growing every day — with quality by design (QbD) giving impetus to this expansion.

Even as it matures, the biopharmaceutical industry is still a highly entrepreneurial one. Partnerships of many kinds — from outsourcing to licensing agreements to consultancies — help companies navigate this increasingly global business environment.

Wednesday, March 21, 2018 Daily Archives

This webcast features: Jamie Freeman, PhD, Product Manager, Horizon Discovery While great strides have been made in increasing the yield of biotherapeutic proteins, these have been achieved mainly through process improvement with a particular focus on media and feed strategies. Aside from single gene knockouts to allow for metabolic selection systems, the CHO host itself remains largely unchanged from that which was used thirty years ago. This webcast will cover how Horizon Discovery has used the recently released annotated sequence…

Vetter has won the 2018 ISPE Facility of the Year Award (FOYA) in the Facility of the Future category for its Center for Visual Inspection and Logistics. The renowned prize is awarded annually by the prominent industry association, the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering (ISPE), to companies that have shown outstanding foresight, care and innovative creativity in the design and implementation of their facilities. The FOYA judges panel for ISPE was impressed by the intelligent combination of location design, state-of-the-art…

Over the past decade, stem cell research has provided new avenues for deeper investigation into tissue repair and aging processes, as well as regenerative medicine methods. One of the major players in such research endeavors are mesenchymal stem cells (MSC), also known as mesenchymal stromal cells. MSC are typically found in bone marrow, adipose, placental, and umbilical cord tissues1 and are a type of adult stem cell. In vivo, these cells are headquartered in special microenvironments or “niches” in the…

It’s time to tackle the challenges of sustainable and cost-effective commercial manufacturing regarding cell and gene therapy. Cell and gene therapies have many of the same manufacturing needs as biopharmaceuticals. As a result, industry experts expect single-use technologies used in biopharmaceutical clinical trials and commercial production to play a larger role in the future development and production of cell and gene therapy. Single-use systems are already incorporated in the development of cell and gene therapies today. However, many of those…